Scanning large images for restoration

You may find that the photos that you want to repair are in more than one piece or they are way too big for your scanner. What can you do?

Help with scanning larger photos

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No problem you can scan them in several pieces to enable one large photo to made whole again. When scanning an old photo with the intention of repairing it, you may want to check what your scanner is doing in the background as this can affect the results., unless you look into the settings. More on saving images correctly here Saving your images correctly.

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Scanning Problem: The scans don’t match?

When you scan a photo with multiple scans, you may find that the pieces end up looking different. The tones and exposure and even colour may look great on some and totally different on others, what is going on?

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When your scanner when set to automatic just like a digital camera set to “auto”, it will exposure and correct the image where and how it sees fit. Images with more dark tones in them, may be compensated for and end up lighter and vice-verse for light images ending up darker. This is very important when scanning colour photos as it quite common for the colours to change too! Its important to get all your scans all the same for a perfect match.

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Solution:

It is best to set your scanner to manual and switch off all the automatic settings and keep the scanning resolution the same. Turn off the auto tone, brightness, contrast, colour sections and just scan in colour, as basic as you can get. This way both scans should end up the same in their tones and exposures and size. You can then be sure when you are trying to match up the two halves that they will meet easily and make the photo repair simpler too. Especially useful when scanning large prints bigger than your scanner. Make sure you scan with around 25% overlap on each scan then this will give plenty to match up when getting your restorer to stitch them together again.

IMPORTANT: Do not rotate your photo around as you scan, it must be kept the same orientation. Most scanner dont use square pixels. By changing the orientation the image wont match up properly.